October 7th, 2007
A Sketch
You slice the cabbage in half, to expose the hard center, the only refuse, the part you will not, will never, eat. Then you carefully take the cabbage apart, like confetti, since no guest of yours has ever eaten a whole head of cabbage, unlike you, who can nibble at the outer fringes like other people would an apple. Your knife, thinks Mauritius, will make the cabbage excellent for other humans' consumption.
Outside, in his dining room, a woman sat, smoking a cigarette and watching cartoons in the television across the room, beyond the sofa. A swift, sadistic animation about the extraordinary lives of a cat and a mouse, that classic, universal question of who will escape the jaws of reality first, be it the mouse who is the natural prey of the domesticated cat, or the cat who is a magnet for heavy household appliances and baseball bats.
WHAM.
"Oi what is that?" called the girl, startled from the scene where the mouse prepares to victimize the cat with a hotfoot. Inside the kitchen, Mauritius was surveying the debris of the battle between a chicken and a gigantic cleaver. The cleaver had managed to cut clean through the bone of the chicken, a messy but curiously bloodless affair (if you discounted the fact that the chicken was, in fact, headless, plucked, and long dead).
Sort of like a cartoon.
Mauritius was breathing heavily. His bones were frail, drained of calcium and riddled with rheumatism. He couldn't even carry a simple cleaver, he was no strong man. The girl knew this, but she couldn't do anything, no, since he'd locked the door to the kitchen so that he could work alone without help, or interruptions. It wasn't enough that the cleaver insulted his manliness, but help from a strong woman decades younger than him insulted his chi to no end. It only follows that he didn't answer, but instead he fired up the grill and began to heat a pot of water.
But halfway between the moment the pot began to boil and five seconds later, Mauritius thought better of it and grabbed the pot with his bare hands and drained it on the kitchen sink, swearing silently to himself the whole time, mostly due to his assumption that the girl would be willing to wait for a dish of afritada, also due to the burning sensation he was now feeling at the tips of his fingers. He stopped to consider if he should also start beating himself up for thinking that boiling water was part of afritada, but that was neither here nor there and he put on a frying pan and proceeded to fry the chicken.
Have you been tripping?
Dinner: ice, steamed cabbage, fried chicken. The girl ate like the Roman army.
"No stories tonight, old man?"
"What?"
You don't want to tell me about how you spent the entire afternoon taking over the entire paperwork of seven different divisions in the company, working like you meant it, the collected liquidated garbage of seven different groups of game developers, how you had to go through the various kinds of unreality you'd encounter in fighting simulations, in role-players. "Nothing to gripe about in the world of the volunteer remote bookkeeper's world?"
"Oh. Well, no, nothing really. The numbers just keep on punching through the ether of the world, and since I'm not touching any of the money, just making sure they were consistent, it's like I'm dealing more with ideas rather than something big, something corporate. I mean, even at my age, the idea of two million dollars as a budget for an entire quarter of a year is still intangible."
"Two million dollars. Putang-ina. And all that money goes to a group of what, six or seven people? Mga game developers? Ang susuwerte ng mga gago'ng yun, putsa. Kung me ganun ako'ng pera, I might have gotten married."
"Go into programming. You're seventeen years old, use your imagination. You can't keep on complaining forever, iha."
"Yes, but I want to."
"Just like how you insist on keeping me company with cigarette smoke and Tom & Jerry from the moment I get home to God knows what time. Some things are pointless. Things like fiction, adventure. When you get past forty-five, you'll start thinking that the next greatest adventure is getting up in the morning to take a bath."
The girl kept quiet. This was where he went into a tirade of the vast differences between their ages, how he was old enough to be called manong, while she considered kids born during the 1980's as aged, people called Thundercats. The 90's were a fantastic time to be born, it was the cusp of ancient tradition and brick games. Kids stopped playing with tops and began to sport remote controlled cars and airplanes. You don't know anything, lolo.
"How can you still think of how kids can make mistakes when you spend half you day absorbed in the excesses of an industry geared towards consumerism for people generations younger than you?" she asked.
Touche. That was a good point, he conceded. "You'd think I should be inured by now."
"Yes. Yes I do."
"Not that you care."
I'm here, aren't I? she screamed at him from somewhere. She didn't know where, exactly. She just knew that she screamed it. Very, very loud.
But she kept quiet. The silence was so silent, omnipresent and heady like a swirl of memory or memories, that she just concentrated on the chicken. She was too young to be introspective anyway.
"How's the chicken?" he asked.
She nodded to say that it was okay. The fact was, Mauritius was a really, really good cook, despite all his other faults, and she just loved sitting there with him, waiting for him to start relaxing with a small tumbler of beer, while watching her watch the night's cartoons.
Sure enough, after Mauritius cleared the dishes, he settled down on the sofa with his favorite beer, a San Miguel Pale Pilsen. She curled up beside him, and for a few minutes, nothing happened except the continuous flux of pictures flowing from the luminous cathode ray tube.
"Why do you think that I don't care?" she asked eventually. "I mean, I'm here almost every night, just to make sure you don't get lonely. Kahit na cartoons lang pinapanood natin. I mean, don't I at least get points for being sweet?"
"It isn't that you don't care," he said carefully, pacing himself. He concentrated on his beer, watching the bubbles form his thoughts one by one. "Maybe I don't understand why you should care. Because, I mean, you're a neighbor's kid. Who's decades younger. Why would someone like you care about me?"
"That's a really funny question," she said.
"Yes," he said.
He flipped through the channels, eventually ending up on HBO, on the scene where the Nazis were hot on the heels of the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. It was amazing, he thought, how musicals turned violent situations like war and emigration into a farce, throwing some comedy into the face of reality, like a clown with a plateful of cream pie.
She curled up against him some more, snuggling into the crook of his arm, breathing in the scent of him, sweat and a bit of aftershave, a little greasy whiff thanks to the chicken. "I care about you," she said, closing her eyes. "I don't know why I do. But when I'm here, right beside you, I feel safe. It's not like some of those relationships where the only thing the younger partner'd be after is money. Alam ko namang wala ka'ng masyadong pera eh. Pero I don't know. You're still attractive to me."
As if to prove her point, she tilted up her head, and leaned into his face, locking her lips with his, cutting off whatever response he had.
He was thinking I don't deserve this, sitting with such a lovely woman who cared more for me than she did for her own parents. I'm no strong man, I'm a relic of the past with rheumatism-riddled bones and a sadly steady paycheck. But something is drawing me more and more to her, and I don't know if I should continue it, but right now, you could make a musical about this moment, or draw it on paper, make a sketch of it out of the lack of anything else to do, and the world would still be perfect.
The clock struck midnight. It was a cool, quiet evening.